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As I mentioned to MM after a good, headbandless kapotasana assist today, the pain in my shoulder is on the move. It started off on one end of the right collarbone, moved to the other end, then into the middle of my trapezius, and has now settled under the shoulderblade.

My premise, straight out of Naive Science Journal, is that all’s well if the pain keeps moving. It means there is some structural rebalancing going on.

That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt like hell sometimes.

Yesterday, when My Gift and I were at Ikea, my neck started getting sore. Sore as in progressively more excruciating as we looked for a lamp, nightstand and bed frame for her new apartment. The pain was right where the neck meets the occipital bone at the back of the skull. As if God was trying to pop my head off like a bottle cap. Then it started spreading down the back of my neck and into my traps, which suddenly felt like they were made of rock. Rock that was on fire. Jesus. Would I make it through Ikea and help her find a can opener before I had to be hospitalized for meningitis?

Yeah. My meningitis ran its course in about an hour. Seriously, I have no idea what that was all about, but it was nasty and I’m glad it’s over. I suspect it has something to do with all this shoulder business in intermediate. And don’t even get me started on the heart opening stuff.

***

Current practice is through to yoga nidrasana, followed by urdhva dhanurasana, assisted dropbacks, and tics. Tics were okay today. Sometimes I rather dread them, primarily because MM insists on a two footed kick up. Me, I like a nice scissor kick. I can actually manage handstands rather well when left to my own scissor-kicking devices. But no, he wants the bunny hop thing.

With scissor kicks, I feel like my legs are driving the bus, and I trust my legs. With bunny hops, my butt is at the wheel, and God knows what it’ll do. Crash, most likely. Look out, Muscle Man!

Despite my reservations, we got through the tics and it wasn’t too bad. I quite like the cracklings that run up my spine as I go over. MM is amused by them, as well. Vata music.

It’s delightful to have some days off where I can loll about in savasana. Afterwards, I chatted for a while with The Poetess. She is teaching in a teacher training program in California, and has been commuting back and forth (via car!) every week. She’s decided to just stay in CA for the last couple of weeks. It was either that or fall asleep at the wheel. I don’t know how she managed for as long as she did. Anyhow, it was lovely to have time to talk after practice — usually I finish up, savasana quickly, then race to the shower so I can get in to the office on time.

Today, though, savasana, chat, then home to make a big mug of chai. Mmmmmmm.

I don’t mind going back to the office next week, but I REALLY don’t want to go back to the hurrying. I wonder if there’s any way to avoid that?

I am on my 5th day of doing one thing at a time and not hurrying. It’s delightful. “Are you single-tasking?” The Cop asked this morning, as I read on the bed.

Yes! Yes, I am.

This morning, practice was relaxed and open. I had a glimpse of how I usually practice: with an eye toward the upcoming day at the office. A sense of urgency. I don’t know if it’s possible to get rid of this feeling (unless I win the lottery), but I want to minimize it.

All the usual ups and downs of intermediate. I’ve been doing prep poses ahead of kapotasana, to try to open up my shoulders and lengthen my triceps, etc. So I did all of those, then set up for kapotasana. MM came over to help out. Now, for a short digression. My hair is cut in layers and kind of crazy curly. I used to have it longer, and wore it tied back in pigtails, but then I got the bright idea that cutting it short would be useful for practice. Except, as it turns out, my crazy curly hair, when short, just goes berserk and stores up humidity and sweat. Basically it just expands like a rain cloud over the course of practice. Now I’m trying to grow it back out. In the meantime, I have lots of loose ends. So my solution is to put teeny pigtails in the back. But what about all the layers on top and on the side? I know! A stretchy headband! Yesterday I bought a bunch of headbands, just generic ones in subdued colors. Problem solved. Okay, back to kapotasana. I go back, MM helps me find my toes, then leans forward to press down on my elbows (getting them to the ground is one of our goals). At this point, I push into my legs more, my head slides closer to my feet, and the arch deepens. Except this morning, what I realize is that my headband is made of some kind of space age fabric that sticks like velcro to Manduka mats. Uh. I’m stuck.

I come out of the pose and MM looks perplexed. “It seemed like it was going to be really easy…” he says.

“My headband got stuck,” I tell him.

“What?”

“My headband got stuck.” I show him the headband. He tips his head like Waylon when he is confronted by an unfathomable situation.

“Uh, okay.” And off he goes.

Note to self: Take off headband before kapotasana. And consider greasing top of head somehow.

In eka pada sirsasana, I am happy to find myself able to look straight across the room (instead of curling down under the weight of my leg). Woohoo! MM comes over to adjust me. He pushes down on my shin. Down, down, down. I have one of my little instantaneous visions: my femur bending. Yup, like a chicken bone in science class, made flexible by soaking the bone in vinegar for a few days.

I guess that’s better than feeling it in the knee.

On Wednesday, we (as in, 90% of this work fell to The Cop) moved My Gift back down to the next town over, where she will do her senior year. On moving day, I took a meeting from 10 AM until noon, then we drove up to her place up north (a 2 hour drive), picked up a U-Haul, packed it (Go, Cop!), drove back down here, unpacked (You’re a god, Cop!) and got her set up a bit. Wrapped up at 11 PM. Note to self: next time she moves, hire a mover. It wasn’t fun. (Thank goodness The Cop does Crossfit.)

Still, it’s great to have her close by again. Today I’ll bring her coffee and meet the new kitten she adopted on Friday & we’ll wait for the internet/cable guy.

I am taking a week and a half off from work. Badly needed down time. My goal? To not think about more than one thing at a time and to not hurry to do anything for the whole time I’m off. God, it’s sweet. My job is all about multi-tasking and moving as fast as possible at all times. Not healthy. Not by a long shot. And not optimally efficient, for that matter. The illusion is that the more I do and the faster I do it, the more gets done. But 1) at what cost? and 2) is it even true (that more’s getting done)?

I’m going to try to experiment with one-thing at a time when I get back to work. If nothing else, it makes life MUCH more pleasant. I was definitely work- and task-crazed. It’s an insidious addiction.

Practice. I’ve been suffering a bit with this business of having a practice I suck at. Feeling pretty discouraged for a couple of days there — probably in part because of overwork and burnt-outness. I didn’t have huge reserves of emotional resilience. I don’t care what anyone says — intermediate practice is tough for me, and it takes some oomph to go in and work through it day after day.

But I haven’t done jack since Wednesday except practice and read and sleep (woohoo!) and it seems like yesterday’s practice got me back in a more stable frame of mind. And the fact that it is led primary on
Saturday helps.

There was a small contingent of guys who appeared to be friends of Muscle Man at led primary. Young (in their 20s), muscle heavy, highly tattooed. Still working on their binds and lotuses, but pressing up into handstands & doing aerial transitions all over the place. Now that I think about it, they may be climbers. Definitely had the bohemian sub-culture thing going on. I am so accustomed to the noodly people (generally female) of yoga that I was happy to see some guys troop into the room. And not noodly yoga guys. Mesomorphs.

Class was primary and then a quick selection of intermediate favorites. MM asked me to demonstrate laghu vajrasana before we all tried it. No prob. I can laghu v ’til the cows come home and always have been able to. I don’t even think about it when I practice it every morning, ’cause I’m in the midst of trying to wring all the kapo prep out of ustrasana, then turning my thoughts toward the imminent attempt at kapotasana.

So when one of the tattooed contingent came over as I was leaving class and said, “That was awesome,” I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “That pose you demoed,” he said, “It was beautiful.”

Ha! Silly me. I’ve managed to totally devalue what I’m good at and hyperfocus on the stuff that needs work. (”If I can do laghu vajrasana, it must not be that hard!”) I have to admit, though, it really pleased me to have someone strong give me props about a strength pose. I need to savor my strength a bit more. And I also think we need more focus on strength in Ashtanga. The hell with this flexibility BS.

Yesterday I started taking some Zyflamend supplements to see if they’d be useful for reducing inflammation & soreness. I didn’t notice much of anything yesterday, aside from a sketchy tummy last night, but today at practice I felt like I was going to burst into flames.

Turmeric, anyone?

As far as soreness goes, I am in good shape. One thing I make note of during practice is the way my lower back feels when I vinyasa out of dhanurasana, parsva dhanurasana, and ustrasana. It’s one of my superstitions: I am very happy if there is no soreness in those down dogs, and I believe I’ll have an easy kapotasana. Now, the weird thing about this superstition is that I have often had soreness and then gone on to have a painless kapotasana — in fact, painless kapotasanas (I’m talking about the lower back here) are the norm. Still, I love when all those down dogs are painless. And this makes me wonder: do other people sometimes feel sore in the vinyasas between dhanurasana through ustrasana?

Kapotasana: Muscle Man can easily guide me to my toes in kapotasana these days. I get the little crease between toes and soles and feel happy. Well, except for the fact that my forearms aren’t on the floor. Too much tension between my shoulderblades. That’s the weak link in kapo for me. Muscle Man expects me to grab my toes and hang on, so he can let go of my hands and push down on my elbows. But as soon as he lets go of my hands, they slip off my toes. I got this idea that I needed to curl my toes up so I’d have something to hang onto, but I was too busy pushing the tops of my toes into the floor. Plus, I couldn’t figure out which way was up and which down anyhow. Which way should I curl my toes to make them go UP? I wondered. Why am I even thinking something like this?!? Finally he brought my hands to my toes and then stood on my hands. Then he pushed my elbows down. Nice work, MM! Sorry I couldn’t be any help.

Acceptance. I am working with acceptance. 1) My shoulder is hinky — specifically, the right collarbone has a compression issue. As in, it doesn’t want to be compressed right now.

What that means is I can do my eka padas, and the left side of dwi pada, but the second side isn’t happening without significant teacher-intervention. The compression thing happened when I had dwi pada halfway there, then tried to wriggle my shoulder under the right leg. Using an internally rotated shoulder to press hard against the weight of two legs folded up behind your back is, apparently, not the best idea. Still, I suspect I’d do it the same way, given the same situation. So for a little while, I’m gonna do eka pada and skip the dwi, unless MM wants to make me do it help me out with it.

More acceptance: I’d gotten to a point with primary where I felt at least minimally competent. I could do a consistent practice with some super-duper days and some eh, not so great days. But not much variability between those two possibilities. Even a bad day wasn’t too terribly bad. Now, though, it’s a total crapshoot. I’m good through suryas and standing — all even drishti and still mind. Once I hit the intermediate poses, though, it can be like driving off a superhighway onto a dirt road bump! bump! bump! Some days are great, some are like a bad climb, where you drag yourself up using your fingernails and elbows and forearms and knees and even the insides of your ankles (all of which get skinned to hell in the process) ’cause there’s no other option than to crawl up that rock.

Today, as I rolled around on my back with my left leg behind my head and the right one flapping in the breeze, I thought: God, it’s come to this.

Gah! The pain of learning supta kurmasana is back! You know, that horrifying clavicle pain? Yup.

I know where this is from: dwi pada sirsasana. And yoga nidrasana. But especially dwi pada. I totally felt it today when I had my left leg back and then pulled my right leg up — whatever inward rotation I’m doing to tuck my right arm through and shove my shoulder under the leg is OWIE!

MM pointed out that I have to push my chest forward and extend through the lower back. Yeah. You know, generally I’m more likely to kinda internally rotate inward and get more concave through the front body. Especially when I’m stressed.

So this is turning into a psychological event: have to keep my spirits up during practice, or else I retreat to the inward-folding.

No matter what, though, post-practice I’m a cheerful little creature.

Slow and steady. Slow and steady…

Wow, great practice today. One of those ones that feels good right from the first breath.

The heat was on, for some reason, and Muscle Man couldn’t get it to turn off. So we had both heat and air-conditioning running, in an attempt to even things out.

The room was HOT. It was great! Haha! Okay, the panting from the heat part during tough portions of the practice wasn’t so pleasant, but the bendiness was pretty sweet.

Kapotasana is coming along nicely. At this point, the weak link is the tightness in my shoulders. I’m good with that, because my lower back feels perfectly fine as MM keeps me in the pose for a bazillion breaths as he directs me to pull my shoulder blades down and stretch my triceps and all that sort of thing. It’s more an endurance exercise than anything else at this point.

Eka pada sirsasana! Woohoo! I had SUCH a sucky practice on Monday that I really felt some despair about eka pada. Liz mentioned (somewhere in the blogosphere) that she used to feel she’d never get her leg behind her head, that maybe it was a pose she just would NEVER get — and that’s how I felt on Monday. Reading about her experience, though (i.e., she got it & now really loves it), inspired me. Tuesday’s eka pada was pretty good (especially considering Tuesdays and Thursdays are home practices, so there’s no one to crank my leg), and today’s was REALLY good. Really good as in not hurting and also being able to sit more upright and not feel so CRUSHED by my leg. Which weighs a LOT, you guys.

Oh, did I mention I wore my short shorts? Seriously. The ones I wear at home that are super short. Handy, given our heated room in the desert summer. But I still felt like an ass. To my own credit, though, I thought about where I was going to throw down my mat, and I made sure that when I turned, my butt’d be facing the wall and not any people. Also set up at an oblique angle to the mirrors, so I wouldn’t be in danger of flashing anyone. I never have any flashing issues in the home yoga room, but I wanted to just be super sure in the shala. I mean, really — who needs to be flashed at 6 in the morning?

Why all this fuss about shorts? Well, ’cause practice is SO much easier with bare legs. And I also was happy because I had on my “home practice” clothes. Like a security blanket.

Dwi pada on my own is rather horrifying, and if Muscle Man isn’t available to wrestle me into it, I like to ignore it and just do some extra eka padas, but he told me today that I have to keep struggling to do it by myself. Sigh. Doesn’t he understand? I only like to look like an idiot at home. Still, I’ll do it because he said so.

Yoga nidrasana all by myself this morning! A first. I find yoga nidrasana really frightening for some reason, though I’m not sure why. I quite like supta kurmasana, so you’d think it’d feel the same way. Not so, though. It makes me feel very anxious. So usually I bail before I’m fully in. Not today. Woohoo!

Went through to pincha mayurasana, which makes me feel exactly the way I imagine I’d feel in a guns ‘n skis biathalon: too shaky for precision. I won’t say anything about the titthibasana sequence because I can’t try to do EVERYTHING well, especially something so ridiculous that burns my quads so much. If I keep at my lame attempts, I will get better at it. That’s my official strategy. ‘Nuff said.

But is that the end? Oh no. MM is into the backbending extravaganza: urdhva dhanurasanas, assisted backbends to the floor, backbends with arms folded, hop up into handstand, handstand into backbend (assisted, but still!). Quite a little circus workout. Definitely a challenge. I rather hate it, but I’m sure I’d miss it if I wasn’t given the opportunity forced to do it.

This is all so fun, though I have to laugh when I try to figure out why.

Led primary yesterday. There doesn’t seem to be any overlap between Mysore and led class — totally different people. And yes, I’ll admit it: in the few minutes that we sit outside waiting for the class before us to leave, I usually end up not liking everyone around me. Actually, that’s too harsh. I don’t care for the general atmosphere of the studio on a Saturday at 10 AM. I prefer the “everyone wanders in on their own and doesn’t say much to anyone else” energy of Mysore mornings. I suppose it’s possible that if all of the Mysore people sat outside and chatted ahead of practice, I’d get annoyed with that, too.

Anyhow, Saturday seems more about fashion and seeing and being seen and presenting yourself to the rest of the community, etc. Or perhaps I am just projecting.

Still, Muscle Man opened practice with a few words about practice being practice and about how people should be happy with their practices. But not too happy. Oooh, is he talking about ego and greed? Indeed he is. I love lectures about ego and greed. Seems like they aren’t mentioned enough in yoga circles. I know, it’s hard to focus on ego and greed when there are rainbows and unicorns to talk about.

I remember talking to my brother — who was a personal trainer — when he was teaching me weight training techniques. I was focused on something detail-oriented and commenting that I needed to think about it more, when he offered the following teaching (which has stayed with me to this very day): “Instead of thinking about that, maybe you should think a little about impatience and greed.”

Haha! Yes, that is very good advice in almost any situation.

So led practice was good. I practiced next to a very tall, very skinny, very flexible, very young emo guy. I was immediately aware of how wispy his breath was. He absolutely (from a physical perspective) has all the makings of a natural Ashtangi. What he’ll have to realize, though, is where energy comes from in the breath. I am frightened for him, too — because I am a vata rabbit-breather. And if I saw his breath as ethereal, he’s got some serious grounding to do.

***

It feels like the habits/tensions in my body are rising up out of me. Seriously. The tension that usually resides in the mid to upper back region is migrating upwards. There’s “stuck” energy around the collarbone area, but everything below that is transparent. It’s a very cool feeling.

At my massage yesterday, Candice kept looking for all of the usual knots — in my shoulders, in the QLs, but there was nothing to be found, even in my neck. I figured that after all the LBH work, my neck’d be a mess.

“Wow, your body feels really good,” she said as I was leaving.

“Right?” I agreed, “Yoga’s been really hard this week, but it seems to be sorting everything out.”

“Are you still putting your leg behind your head?” she asked, kind of shaking her head in disbelief. “I wouldn’t have guessed it, but it seems to be a good idea!”

Muscle Man is kicking my butt. Or, I guess more accurately, intermediate through pincha mayurasana is kicking my butt. Or, to be even more precise, kapotasana, eka pada sirsasana and dwi pada sirsasana are kicking my butt.

And then he threw in three assisted tics this morning.

Waaaaah!

***

Nah, it’s okay. It’s certainly strenuous. And I feel my sacrum shifting around (on the move). A little weird, but not as frightening as when I first started this particular sequence.

This morning’s dwi pada assist went particularly well, but then he backed off a bit and said, “I don’t want to push it much more. I know what I’m feeling when I get assisted, and I know how to work with it…” I immediately interrupted to say I’m still not quite sure what’s going on with the pose, so I appreciate his concern and the fact that he’s not going to try to push me too far.

I am in this for inquiry and incremental change. Not to be forced into anything. Though, goodness knows, I suppose that would seem like hair-splitting to any civilians who witnessed the Mysore room. I’m sure it all looks like forcing.

***

The energy thing is pretty trippy. I get huge surges of very strong energy, and it’s funny because I don’t quite know how to surf it or channel it or anything. The other day, I felt like I had an ongoing energy leak — the image in my head was of a sun just radiating all of its energy straight out. Other days, it feels very focused and intense. I feel quite cheerful and kind of… I don’t know, transparent, I guess would be the word for it.

But man, am I crashing at night. And vivid dreams.

This is a very interesting exercise.

Karen, whining: “Practice hurt today. It hurts to put your leg behind your head.”

The Cop: “They aren’t made to go that way. It hurts because you are defying the will of God.”